StarTalk Podcast: Cosmic Queries – Proving Einstein Right

this is star talk i'm your host neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist and today's topic is proving einstein right chuck i needed you for this one because yeah yeah man you're the man i don't know how you need me because i i never knew einstein was wrong so i'm trying to figure out where where's the controversy where's the controversy well to talk about that controversy i'm bringing a friend and long time colleague jim gates jim welcome to star talk well neil it's good to be back in the presence of a star oh james please it's okay thank you thank you i appreciate you i will leave one that one at that [Laughter] so jim you've been at this for a long time well you've been an einstein fan for sure but a theoretical physicist and your director for the center for theoretical physics at brown university providence rhode island and uh that's a title how long you've been doing that so uh when i was 66 neil uh i was recruited from the university of maryland to brown i went around telling my friends uh asking friends why why do you think they want an old car no it's not the age it's the mileage okay one of my friends said jim you're not an old car you're an antique car oh oh there you go the preservable antiques they they hold their value i'm gonna go one better than your friend james you are vintage my friend you're a vintage vintage is vintage gives you even more money than antiques well i i i switched after 33 years at my previous uh university it came here and where was the previous university university of maryland college park wow and do they are you still on speaking terms because i i would be kind of angry after 33 years that you just up and leave me just leave our marriage after 33 years well i don't know if the marriage is the right analysis [Laughter] but right in the independent of debating that particularly we did we did part of determined in fact i'm an emeritus professor there and as an emeritus professor i have taught uh two consecutive years courses on public policy nice evening courses yep so i'm in good terms so if i remember correctly you were on obama's um uh advisory council for science and technology right that's exactly right neil i served seven years on the president's council advisors on science and technology now pcas that's right that's right so um but you weren't in the current administration they they didn't invite you to back in there huh i thought we were gonna try to keep okay i just wanna that's all right i uh i was invited to be on this current administration's advisory council on writing jokes about technology there you go um so if you're director of the center that's not necessarily an academic title that's that's a job title so you're also professor of physics indeed i i'm an adult professor here at brown university the endowment is before i'm the so-called ford professor of physics i'm also an affiliate mathematics uh professor and on top of that i'm a faculty fellow at the watson uh institute for public affairs and international affairs wow excellent excellent okay nice stuff so you're like we should we should bring you back for seven other excuses seven other reasons i forget the theoretical physics we've got some policy we gotta figure out here yeah so what we're gonna do is we're gonna structure this program we're going to spend the first segment just you know talking about why was einstein proved right or why did he need to be proved right and then we'll go to q and a we go to go to our cosmic queries and uh chuck you've got customer queries for some i have two and three i have the questions right here and i have to say these are some man people are excited that you're here uh professor they are excited we've got we got some great questions there's no one that triggers more questions than einstein and relativity and we got the man for it well i would say einstein relativity and tyson and what and tyson the most okay right on all right so so jim you published a book in 2019 called proving einstein right and let me get the full title of the daring expeditions that changed how we look at the universe sure and um do you have a co-author who was that i do have a wonderful co-author her name is kathy pelletier she lives in alagosh maine which is just a right across walking to canada and this book is not what people expected usually you know neil your first book as i recall was partly autobiographical right well that was one of my first but my fourth book yeah okay four so what i wanted to do with this was to do something i had never seen done before with physicists usually people talk about the wonder and the majesty of looking at nature and their struggle and what have you but what i wanted to do and i had wanted to do this for a decade is to write a book about the interior lives of the people who do the science and so this book is actually dedicated to eight astronomers and albert einstein and we yes we tell the scientific story but what we really want to do is get inside of their heads and tell the story of what they were feeling as they went through this almost decade-long struggle so the book surprises people okay so the book is published in 2019 and if i remember my history that's basically the centennial of this big experiment that showed that einstein was right that's right but but let me back up a little bit so um most people i mean physicists know einstein for both for many things of course but for special relativity and general relativity i think uh often when people think of einstein they they think of the effects of sort of ordinary relativity like time dilations and this sort of thing so that would all happen in in 1905. that's correct so why if that's all happened and it worked and it was you know it was it was smoking effective it explaining our understanding of the universe why didn't everybody say yeah einstein's the man why did it have to wait another 10 years for them to prove some other thing that he did so let me talk about einstein 1905 and thank you for giving me this opening as you know neil in 2005 there was this so-called einstein year of physics and there were celebrations all the world i gave 37 talks on six continents on einstein in that years well i thought there were only five continents [Laughter] no i guess there were seven i get my numbers i yeah i thank you i you left out antarctica yeah okay that because that's the one i've never been to yeah yeah but the penguins will will welcome you with open arms and happy feet yes but the point was yes you're right neil in 1905 he came up with some amazing things about space and time and how they bend and warp and what have you but do you know that in 1907 he was still in the patent office people think that as soon as he came up with his wonderful theories the world beat a path to his door saying hosea hosea you know whatever but no no no that's not what happened it's hosanna jose yeah jose is the prophet but hosanna hosanna is the praise but we knew what you meant well this is what happens when you go off script guys no no but you're right uh but the point was that he did this great piece work but it took two years for the physics community to recognize what he had done wow while he was in that patent office still trying to figure out how to get a job as a physics professor he looked out the window one day and he saw some workmen on the roof and he had this uh sort of story coming to him that if the guy one of the guys fell he wouldn't feel his weight and so that started einstein thinking about gravity he's thinking of the death of someone working on a roof next door i did not know this well not the actual death but right a process that would lead to it yeah it's just just his fault to imminent death okay i did know einstein had this morbid side of him yes and so let me just say i totally get it because i think about the death of the guy that blows that leaf blower outside my bedroom window every saturday morning so and so i started start thinking about gravity and by so this is like an in fact he calls this the happiest thought of his life wait so so wait so jim this is like newton's apple moment yeah where he sees the apple falling and then he sees the moon and then there's a there's a there's a eureka moment in there and that's what happened with einstein in 1907. so the thing is curious about einstein is although people think about him as a mathematical genius every time he did something he actually had to learn more mathematics so he didn't actually have the mathematics to realize what his intuition was and he didn't get it right until 1915 or 60. you know jim that happens to me all the time i have thoughts i have to invent new math to you know that's just that's just a thing well you know some of us actually do that another another whole story and i'll tell you about that one later but uh anyhow so he had this idea that took him almost a decade to get it down to the mathematics and when he finished it it was the theory of general relativity it's the piece of thing that tells us that there was a big bang it's the piece of mathematics that lets us know we live in a universe that is 13.8 billion years old and so that came from that 1917 epiphany wow i mean 1907 1907 right right right right now now remember it's all math it's all mad so if it's all math how do you know he got it right right just because the math works doesn't mean it has to correspond to any objective reality exactly and so when he finally gets his discussion together he in fact even before he gets the right answer he starts talking about he starts giving talks about it and so very early on astronomers realize well he realizes first that astronomers would be critical to try to prove that his math is actually as you said neil something that happens in the real world and he begins it by talking to this uh german astronomer named irvine findlay feundlich god i never heard it again no but no one's ever heard okay but it's if i'd ever met someone named irving finley foreign yes i'd remember that i think i'm pretty sure well well i have said uh for your program i sent some photographs of all the people that we're talking about that's the first guy that einstein starts talking to seriously as you know i have a way to prove my man and he first started saying if you look at starlights could you show that starlight bends when it passes near uh near jupiter and the astronomer says you know nah that doesn't quite work then he starts asking questions about well suppose we were looking at the night sky uh the in the morning or uh during the early morning or late afternoon could we see bending starlight around perhaps venus or something the guy says you know the astronomers come back no no that won't work and so finally by this set of discussions with foreign he hits upon the idea that if you could watch starlight during an eclipse right you might be able to see the light being bent by the sun because you can't otherwise see a star in broad daylight exactly so it's very special circumstance so that's towards the race okay so this bending of starlight would have been the first uh experimental verification of his general theory of relativity yes and okay and so so now so what year did that happen was that come this is this is this these conversations around uh 1912 or so that he starts telling other people about society okay and that's how you get the creativity of other people to help you figure out how to make it work bingo and that's what our book is about is it's about the other people it's not really about einstein okay so what's all this we hear about his wife possibly being a big engine to his creativity a lot of people have well this is one book uh my sex wife i think is the title um there are a lot of people who have posited that as as having been important but from my reading of the history she was certainly his partner as he was working through uh in bern as a poor uh patent examiner trying to do physics she was certainly a partner to burn this city in germany in switzerland switzerland excuse me right right uh he was so she's certain was his partner there but in the actual settling of the special theory of relativity from and i've i've read over a dozen books trying to get this straight in my own head the preponderance of evidence is that he worked it out with the friend of his uh on a train on a tram ride thinking about the clock tower in the city of burns so i mean it's a fantastic story [Laughter] so what you're saying here jim is had einstein been a loner and not traveled anywhere he wouldn't come up with any of his ideas how much life exposure is the right amount to fully realize your your your creativity that can be expressed i tell people all the time that being a scientist means that you swim in a sea of information and that information comes from your colleagues so you cannot be i mean i know the the archetype stereotype view is that as a scientist you go off in the corner and you sort of think big thoughts but that's not what actually happens i've lived this life for almost for over 30 years and you are constantly in conversation with your colleagues and you use them to hone and to refine your thoughts and distill your thoughts and curate your thoughts so jim the active word there is that you are swimming in these influences not drowning in the influence i was going to say yeah yeah so that's where that's why where i with cathy pelletier we wanted to talk about these people that basically were using what einstein inspired them to but to swim towards this discovery of whether his math was an accurate description of nature wow do you think einstein had any doubts about whether it was all true from my reading no um he sort of said you know he sort of says things like if if the theory of general relativity uh had failed to uh receive experimental and observation support that he would have felt sorry for the good lord because that was a really brilliant idea right which is which is kind of say a kind of way of saying like i'm smarter than god so it definitely says that yeah no it doesn't really no no jim jim you're lying jim no i'm not lying if you read a lot about einstein you find out he's a very very complicated character and with resp and if chuck said you brought up the issue of god okay and and you did bring it up i did yeah i mean to me when somebody says that statement it kind of sounds like you know i'm smarter than god i don't know but see einstein's although you can interpret that statement that way that's not really what einstein felt because okay in fact uh he talks also about the illimitable spirit that is a spirit without limits so it's clear that if you can use a phrase like that you're not putting yourself above such an entity okay all right that's a very good point he didn't use that phrase in that sentence though but okay not in that sentence in that moment he felt badass is all i'm saying yeah yeah yeah yeah it's not yeah because it because it is you know um jim before we go into the second segment and solicit our our cosmic queries just give me a minute or two i know it should be hours or two but give me a minute or two on the idea that math is just something we invented as humans yeah and and it works what's up with that you know there's no reason that it should work at all you know neil this is one of the most this is the only piece of magic that i've ever experienced and seen in reality i love that except i'd love that it's magic it's it's a piece of magic but it happens to be a part of our reality i don't know of any other form of magic for which i can say this and this is human-created magic we create something and it magically describes reality and enables you to predict and understand and extend yeah it acts like a third eye for those of us who are scientists it lets us see things that are not seeable otherwise i was i made a presentation at the new york academy of sciences about three years ago two years ago and it's precisely on this point of the magic ability of mathematics it's an hour-long interview so i'm not going to bore you with it but i would was it on youtube or something or is it yeah it's available on youtube absolutely well forgive me i'll go find it i'm going to find it okay the new york academy of science is a a long venerated institution absolutely and i was there with margaret where time and we discussed this magical thing this thing about mathematics and in the at the end of the day what i one of the things i said i said about it is that mathematics as people like me use it it's the only human language that we know accurately allows us to describe nature however other conscious any other conscious being that could produce mathematics will have access to this knowledge so hence the idea that if we meet up with aliens we might start with the symbolic representation of what is and is not sure and math could be the only way we can prevent ourselves from getting our brains sucked out by the evil ways many of us think that that's right so when we come back uh more of this edition of star talk we were talking about proofing einstein right we're going to go straight to our cosmic query's version of that when we return we're back star talk proving einstein right chuck thanks for being there as always pleasure always a pleasure and we got sylvester jim gates a long time friend and colleague who's an einstein expert a theoretical physics expert he's all the kind of expert you need for this absolutely for this incarnation of star talk and we're going to devote this segment to cosmic queries uh jim your your presence on our show was announced to our fan base and they got completely excited by this prospect and so so i i have five pers no i have three percent overlap with jim's expertise in the subject so if i can find a three percent way to add i will but basically this is all going to gym okay so chuck excellent and do it not not that it needs to be said but i have zero percent overlap with jim which is why i'm reading the question so here we go let's start you know what before we start let me just quickly can you um professor give us a quick breakdown between the special and the general when it comes to relativity i think that might be a nice framework for anybody who didn't ask a question to be a part good thank you chuck so let me start with special because it's simpler um you know if you were standing by a road and there was a car that was speeding towards you with its horn blaring what would you actually hear it would go something like right right because you hear that dip in the tone that's going to sounded like you were dying i was going to say uh yeah no i could do better than that here you go right no okay okay so we'll go let's work with that nothing's dying we'll work with the cats now in his spare time neil does sound effects for warner brothers and so so but so the point is that effect is because sound changes its frequency if you're if it's moving towards you that's when it's high pitched or but if it's moving away from you this pitch goes down no exactly so so the point is light actually does the same thing when a light source is coming towards you it appears to be bluer than it actually is when it's moving away from you it is appearing to be redder and that is one of the primary effects of special relativity it's about the relative motion of you and the source of the light in the theory of special relativity and my car analogy it's this the motion of the car either towards or with you so that's what special relativity is all about is if i'm moving and you're not how do i perceive things how do you perceive things that's the simplest that's my five-minute class on special relativity and so and then general no general relatives and you juxtapose that against the general and the distribution of mass and all that stuff so the general theory of relativity is something very very very different and what the general theory of relativity is about is what is gravity you see in the special relativity einstein wasn't thinking about gravity he was just thinking about how things would look if i'm moving but in the general theory of relativity theory of relativity the question is what actually is gravity it's a very deep question that even sir isaac newton didn't get the answer to and the answer that einstein teaches us through his mathematical wizardry is that gravity is the space which we move through and time which we experience uh durations in are combines this like thing he called space-time and gravity is the bending of this thing so that's my short course on generality cool you know there you go all right that was great that was great okay let's go to izzy rohr who says but is this patreon do we do patreon people first uh yes sir thank you um yes we always start with a patreon question because patreon people give us money so and for that we are grateful and we show our gratitude by giving you special preference preference wait wait so wait wait but chuck yeah we're just like congress we're just like your congressman but chuck this just in apparently all your questions are patreon questions i have just learned oh excellent this just in this just happened every single one of them so guess what all of you so thank you to all of you izzy rohr neil chuck jim this is your friend violetta the astrophysics loving kid here in birmingham alabama my mom oh you know her okay cool excellent my mom and i have many discussions have had many discussions about this scientists like to describe einstein's general relativity as being incompatible with quantum mechanics they say things like they mathematically don't work out uh or don't work together so our question is why the heck is that so yeah jim yeah what what's up with that okay so let me give you a second here because i got to phrase this without the mathematics so the idea that is so funny by the way okay let me just say that may have been the most physics thing i've heard in a very long time i've i've got to figure out a way to say this without the mathematics well you see i don't know if you spoke it's like i'm sorry me no speak english me speak mathematics let me speak well you may not know this but neil can tell you this often at the end of my email messages i ask forgiveness for spelling and punctuation errors because my first language is mathematics english is my second language so i'm at a disability when people ask me to talk listen i've never heard a person admit a fault that makes you better than most people [Laughter] but it causes me difficulties chuck on many many occasions okay okay but okay but back to back to quantum back background okay so what essentially happens is if you believe the universe is quantum mechanical then it forces you to forget about things like electrons because electrons we think about as little tiny balls that's the classical picture that you're taught and in fact quantum mechanics says no that's not the way it works for electrons you have to think of these things that are like more like waves except when they act like particles so that's the first thing it gives you this really weird thing that you have to give up an idea except sometimes right right okay so now when you so there's a piece of mathematics around this called schrodinger's equation so i got to bring that in and it tells you how to calculate if you're going to bring up shoulder you got you can't leave out his cat exactly so just keep going or that litter box which hasn't been changed then god knows how long well just litter boxes that's what i'm about to do is litter box we could also go back to neil's uh neil's rendition of a car horn as it approaches you yeah but anyhow so you have a piece of mathematics around giving up the idea of particles and when you now give that piece of mathematics up and try to do gravity you find out you just get into a total mess that you cannot calculate answers anymore that take into account the quantum behavior and that's the message so that's the that's the disconnect there is that schrodinger's equation once you remove anything does that none of the gravity stuff works because wow the way that einstein and newton and all those folks thought about gravity has the idea of particles embedded in it that's the problem all right right so all right so uh who's at the end of the day who's got to give is it is gravity gonna bend to quantum physics i see what you did there i saw what you did there in the gravity bins yes oh you know neil this is actually a very deep question or is there a third idea bigger than both of those that then encloses them under one umbrella there are variants of all of everything that you've just said there well first of all who's going to bend there are people who will tell you that gravity is going to be one that loses this discussion if i had to bet i'd lean that way too yeah yeah and there are a lot of people who believe that that somehow gravity is going to have to give way in uh in some manner there are other people who have this third idea approach that you were talking about neil and one of those and sort of emblematic of that is a discussion that's underway about information and black holes i know neil is probably aware of this but there's this whole discussion about whether information is conserved like we say energy is conserved is information concern and if you have a universe with black holes doesn't that mean that some of the energy disappears i mean some of the information disappears and then you violate a conservation law so there's a whole big discussion in theoretical physics it's been a way underway for over a decade about black holes and information confidence all right so when you talk about information are are you referring to because we just talked about this last week give me one second please that when neil was talking about virtual particles and the evaporation of a black hole and if i'm not mistaken then this particle actually materializes on the outside of the black hole and then that is what escapes and so then if that were to happen are you saying that that somehow messes up this whole idea of the comp conservation of information and chuck you were really paying attention in that it does seem like this chuck neal why you think i do this job man i'm getting a free education yeah okay so that's what okay that's it but the point is that it's in a state of flux we don't know what the final scenario is gonna be but many people like me uh actually think that string theory will have something to do with the resolution okay so the string people think this yeah well it's not just string people i think uh i i don't consider myself a string person for example i am someone who spent their life working on super symmetry and strings happen to intersect that okay well i consider myself a string cheese person so string cheese yes that's about as close as i'm getting to it all right cool all right next one here we go this is paul vogel who says recently between the detection of gravitational waves and a photo of an event horizon of a black hole some significant predictions made by einstein's general relativity have been verified what's the next big prediction made by general relativity that scientists are testing thank you so that's a great question and it's a great question and the answer is the following in 1905 one of einstein wrote four papers among those four papers is one that points out that energy has to be quantized now we know that einstein doesn't like quantum theory but in fact he's one of the fathers of quantum theory because of this 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect that just to be clear he didn't like it because he didn't think the universe should be probabilistic right that's exactly right he wanted determinism as well whereas okay as quantum mechanics says no you can't have determinism you have to go with probabilities so the answer your question chuck is now that we have seen waves of gravity we want to see the quantization of the energy carried by those waves because when we do that we will have the star trek graviton yes in our universe so the same way we know light has a particle are you saying that gravity has particle or wait a minute it would it would have to be that we find this gravity particle that's correct and that's the next big prediction that that i want to find from uh the kind of experiments watching graduates you want to be able to see the quantization of the energy that the gravity waves hold that tells you that gravitons just like you hear in star trek you know you always talk about graviton waves at that point it is no longer science fiction it's a piece of science wait and chuck just to follow your line so a photon is a particle of light but you can also speak of light as waves right right so that so that is a proper analogy we've measured gravitational waves now we want to measure the gravitational particle oh my god you have a photon then you have the graviton so so so i i don't know any experiments out there to measure a graviton is this there aren't right in the works no nothing to my knowledge neil i don't know anyone who's it's this is gonna have to be an exquisite experiment and we're just at the stage of just being able to see the gravity waves so uh you know is it 50 years is 100 years i don't know but as our technology improves someone is eventually going to figure out how to do that detection and then we can stop saying that captain kirk is the only only guy who gets to talk about gravitons so if just a quick question if we have gravitons then gravity being the curvature of space and time has no meaning in the presence of a graviton ah you're following along here for a lot of people the detection of a graviton will likely necessitate a real rethinking of what of what gravity is i've already i mean some of us already are there uh i don't actually think about gravity in terms of geometry it's feel theory that's the tool for people all right so what you're saying is einstein's curved space happens to be a convenience in certain under certain situations that get you the right answer yes and you're good with that but it's not the total story nope okay wow there you go okay yeah that is so just let the record show chuck that jim gates just said einstein had his head up his ass just said that just to make it clear that's funny okay james is sad james like i'm not saying that i'm not i didn't say it's like i'm not saying that the professor's like send your letters to neil because i did not say that okay all right actually we got to take a break and when we come back we'll go out to our third and final segment of cosmic queries uh proving einstein right on star talk we're back star talk proving einstein right and chuck is helping me you know and his because he's you're a big fan of special general relativity aren't you check oh without a doubt are you kidding me come on man yeah yeah of course i mean but of course some people like reality tv i like relativity okay that didn't work no that did so did not work but anyhow but you're on social media what's your best place people can find you on social media at chuck nice comic thank you sir appreciate a nice comic and you even have a i stumbled on this you never told me this i stumbled on one of your you have a ted talk on technology in the future i do technology and the unintended consequences of human interactions yeah or the absence of human interaction by technology yes i stumbled on that i just i'm angry with you for not telling me in advance about that because i can find that on my own uh we've got jim gates an expert in theoretical physics jim do you have a social media platform i do it's uh dr jim gates uh you can see there's a twitter what version and a facebook version but it's doctor it's just dr i present dr yeah all right well we'll find you there and you've got this book proving einstein right yes and uh co-authored with kathy pelletier yeah yeah so uh we're continuing our cosmic queries and just before we begin and chuck before you read one in uh jim you've got a background there that looks it looks kind of spacey actually but then not quite yeah so could you give us a minute on that sure so uh i'm in the odd position deal where it looks like both of my twin children are going to become physicists so this is you know this is not something i set out to do but uh yeah right yeah yeah keep telling yourself that okay uh so my daughter works with black holes and so she's actually actually started publishing and i actually had a chance to watch her give a talk this week so you know big props to my daughter her name is delilah but i also got to give big props to my son the background that you're looking at these green little splotches are artificial neurons that he's been growing in the laboratory because it looks like he's going to be a biophysicist wow as a host okay chuck he's he's he's creating the next generation superhero or superhero villain yeah without a doubt black holes and growing neurons so that's it so that's it right the daughter will harness the power of the black hole and the sun will imbue some some being with that with that power to rule the world i've never heard of have you ever worried about dark side the dark side there it is there it is who knows jim is breeding the dark side so this so this is a is it an actual photo or it looks like it's like no no it looks like our this is actual photo of uh some of the first uh successful cell lines that he's been growing that where you can see the evidence that they're developing a ganglia like uh real breaks wow sweet man okay wow that's amazing well watch that space that's so important okay cool all right let's get to the next question chuck yeah bit brain stuff going on in that family all right here we go let's um let's go to uh let's go to lisa hansen and she says hello to you all from the bay area string theories are so involved and fascinating i love trying to wrap my brain around them i'm wondering what if any other scientific disciplines are involved in the research for as a evidence and proof of these theories what those clues might be well yeah clues in this real universe jim and yeah imagine one i know he was going to say that interesting that that question came up because just last summer i did something for the first time in my life because i tell people i exist at the boundary of mathematics and physics so i'm a fallen mathematician in some sense but last summer i published a paper along with my colleague stefan alexander here at brown university evan mcdonough who was one of our postdocs and my postdoc constantino scripture life is as well as our graduate student leah jenks and in this paper we set out a premise that strings might be able to write structures create structures that could potentially be observed in the cosmic microwave background we call these structures susie reels they're like these funny patterns i hope uh people are familiar with the cmb it's this microwave radiation that you can detect uh by looking out the universe and what we showed in our paper is if you take string the ideas of string theory seriously they have a way of writing a kind of signature in this structure so what kind of science do you need you need to be an astrophysicist someone who could actually look in microwaves at how the universe uh gives us a perspective once again it comes down to the astrophysicist there you go of course absolutely i started look all right now wait i find needed astronomers right spring theory may well need astrophysicists so that begs the question in that collaboration who was batman and who was robin just a quick thing if i remember stefan alexander isn't he he's the jazz musician isn't that cool that's exactly right stefan is a professional level jazz musician although he is a physicist on faculty here at brown university i should have said that differently he's also a jazz musician so he wrote that book the jazz of physics or the physics of jazz or something physics is this yeah okay all right cool cool man all right great stuff that's great stuff i don't let's move on to josh b who says who has more impressive mustache albert einstein or neil degrasse tyson [Laughter] do you know i gotta say anytime i'm on i i got to show up in a movie or in a documentary and they put you in hair and makeup you know and so they do the makeup fine and then they get to the hair and they say um can we trim your eyebrows a little and can we get some of the loose hairs out of your mustache i'm saying wait this is my einstein look you did not you want to be all trimmed and manscaped you need a wiry unkempt just wild mustache yes so what's with that look jim that einstein sported so i'm not sure what the question is [Laughter] you know what with with that is the answer we should just move on that was hilarious let's just go to sam o'neill okay who says well by the way just about eight years ago i just want you to know i was nominated for the mustache hall of fame just so you know just so you know okay okay well i'm going to return that i was once inducted into the luxurious hair association that's a thing it was at the time okay okay here we go this is from sam o'neil he says hey dr tyson hey dr gates what's up chuck my question is what do you theorize that the strings in super string theory are made of love you guys i would give you money and i do samantha from earth from earth [Laughter] on this side of that phone okay okay someone's got to explain that to me you know there you go uh well that's all you jim so go for it yeah yeah so the thing about string theory which perhaps isn't completely understood is that we don't think strings are made of anything they are the fundamental thing if it's a correct picture of the universe they are the thing everything else is made of that's right so therefore you can't say what it's made of because it is the thing that everything's made of that's all we know wow that that feels like a cop out there i was about to say that's a little circular yeah but that's slightly circular just a little bit no no chuck you're right but you see one of the weird things about mathematics is that you have to take some things on faith there's actually a mathematical theorem that says this it's called the one of garth's theorems and so this is one of the really weird things about math that people do not appreciate well no jim be fair it's not that you have to take it on faith is that you have to assert that it's true and if you assert that it's true then everything else works right it's an assertion it's not gee i hope it's no you just declare that it's true and then take everything from there right but you can't prove you can't prove the thing that you assert that's true that's nice therefore it's an element of faith i don't i don't i use faith in a different i know i know you do we have to have another discussion about the whole faith we'll get you i said i'll get you back seven other ways to resolve here if only george michael were here to settle this debate okay sorry pop culture reference shouldn't have bought it here we go since 1980 i know i know damn chuck i can't help you how old are you i am he looks young does that mean he does he just he's he's that oil of old age of old age that's not exactly what he said okay i've never heard that before i like that i heard that from an old friend of mine said oil of old age i like it all right here we go uh this is woody he says after seeing neil's enthusiastic response what are jim's thoughts on a cosmic gravitational background you just talked about the cosmic microwave background and string being able to be visible in that what about a cosmic gravitational background do you have so this would be this would be the the paw print of the birth of the universe expressed in gravitational waves right right would be and i don't see i've never actually heard a scientific discussion of this but that idea it really seems well grounded that one hit a mat no that if one could i mean look the cosmic microwave background is an electromagnetic background it's microwaves right right just like the microwaves you cook it's light it's like it's a form of light right but uh but a gravitational background a gravitational signature from the big bang i don't see any reason why that's not possible i've not heard of any scientific discussions of the concept out okay so part of why the the cosmic microwave background is so useful to us not only that it exists but we have a map a very detailed map of its structure and right now when we're detecting gravitational waves oh something happened we think over in that direction of the sky you know we don't we have nowhere near the the mapping precision to possibly do anything interesting yet and i don't know when it would come oh i would give us about 20 to 30 years because but in order to do what you're saying neil first of all we have to get a sufficient number of gravity wave detectors right now there are about four in the world that are one there's one for example in europe there's one in australia and there are two in the us so that's the minimum number you need to do the mapping and they're not all sort of up fully functional so we got some time right and then you need then you want to get uh gravitational waves of different wavelengths right and so that so it's not just this one that came through get the whole spectrum if i can borrow that word from light and then you have this two dimensions of information exactly to interpret so yeah so yeah it's we're not there yet but if we were there it would tell us a whole lot about the very first moments of the go exactly and that's where science is pushing toward cool yeah that is super super cool all right roman precup or pre-cop says this is it possible that some of the stars observed in the night sky are duplicated or multiply duplicated due to light bending and gravitational fields of a massive object like super like some super black hole i should let neil yeah i could take that go ahead neil yeah i could take that one so the answer is yes next question no so what happens is that the way this unfolds um by the way einstein first predicted that you could make a ring called einstein ring where the light would bend symmetrically in all directions around a single object and create a ring of light from that single object from behind it turns out that's not realistic because that that requires exact lineup right so that there's a perfect geometry of all sight lines that go around most things don't line up exactly but when we do find them sort of line up even if not exactly you find distortions that resemble rings the arcs right they don't make a full ring but they make arcs now if you have one object behind that object will make a minimum of three images one that comes straight through and then two that come around the side and up from there it can make three five or seven images so yes right in fact something cool is i'm cool you ready ready okay so we found we found objects quasars whose light bent around gravity uh galaxy clusters that were sort of midway right from the from einstein's gravity and but the path lengths were not the same okay so this this the path on one side is a little longer than the path than the other now you know how we know because quasars vary they have explosions the light varies so we see it and it varies up here and then a scheduled time later it varies over in exactly the same way so you get to see the same thing twice that's because of the change in intensity of light due to the explosion is that what's happening well no there's things go yeah the quasars can eat things right episodically a lot of weird things episode of things that can happen in quasars but the fact that you have two different path lengths is extraordinary testing of the shape of the curvature of space and how much gravity is in the cluster and how far away the quasar is so it's an amazing it's an amazing thing it's funny to me that you've come back to this because this is what my daughter works on we talked about the cells behind me but when you have rings of matter around rotating black holes chuck he's just giving equal time here i know but when you have rings of matter that glow around spinning black holes you can actually see the back side of the ring because the gravity bends the light from the little girl that's what a daughter works on yeah that's very cool man one last quick one and we'll uh and we got to call we we we're over two we're done with it yeah chuck go ahead uh this is from glenn he says dr gates do you think that white holes exist was einstein observing gave uh what was einstein observing that gave him the impression that they did all right now i'm just going to answer this for you no there are no white holes einstein was a racist like everybody else back at that time and i just couldn't let it be just started off truck couldn't just let it be a black hole could you okay yeah so go ahead you know what i love here's what i love about the professor he's sitting there like i have nothing to do with this whatever chuck is saying right now that's his crazy business i only just met chuck exactly i don't know this man all right go ahead sorry okay so let's make it quick jimmy yeah so what's really quick what's really interesting is black holes aren't black it turns out that because of stephen hawking we know that they actually have this very slight radiation called hawking radiation so they're not exactly black that went out a long time ago so you know got to keep up with the news in physics okay but the white hole the concept the white hole concept i i people who look i don't know any solid scientific arguments about the existence of such things i have not encountered okay and folks we don't see anything in the universe that will resemble what a white hole would be predicted to be which would be the mathematical opposite of a black hole right right so everything is spewing out and that should look like something in the signature of life there's nothing spectacular yeah yeah but we really gotta cut it there jim okay we gotta get you back for nine other subjects that's okay neil okay we got you we got you on the roller derby i got game all right and we'll get a picture from your other child's behind you on the next program okay black holes man black hole always good to have you always a pleasure all right this has been star talk was einstein right proving einstein right edition i'm neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist as always keep looking you

Channel: StarTalk

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Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, albert einstein, chuck nice

Id: SLwfQP-wACY

Length: 52min 26sec (3146 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020